EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL
an unposted post from Sri Lanka in Feb 2022, only posted now
“Everything Is Beautiful”
is a thought and line and attitude I’ve tended towards
for over three decades
…
while I was first taught that
everything might be beautiful
by hitch-hiking in my Twenties
by getting stuck
for who knows how long
on any old random roadside anywhere
in England or France
from standing there at slowly increasing length
losing my frustrations into the distance
by finding ideas thoughts phrases definitions beauties
fascinations
in whatever turned out to be around me
as i started to turn three-sixty
and look
at the messy
and the elegant
at the conventional beauties
and at what some would consider the ugly
the mechanics’ yards
the edge of town sprawl
the slip-road dead-space
the garbage the rusting the half-built the half-fallen
the random roadside anywhere anyhow
...
hitch-hiking also taught me patience
something I certainly did not have before
...
and I also got the idea
Everything Is Beautiful
from a book
Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon
from 1926
where Aragon describes at huge length, for a whole book
if I remember correctly
a single small Parisian street or passageway
one about to be demolished
and relishes in finding and describing tiny details
and then details within those details
finding beauty and enthralment at every level
...
(i seem to recall that, decades later, Aragon
a poet chiefly
flew from France to communist Czechoslovakia
especially to ensure a “Trotskyist” poet got executed
though this ‘fact’ has disappeared from Wikipedia)
...
and then there’s a line I got from Brian Eno
though it’s maybe someone else’s line [?]
which kinda went, I think
...
“...a forest is fascinating at every level
from the aerial view
to a microsection of a leaf observed through a microscope”
...
for at EVERY level of scale
a forest a tree a branch a twig a leaf
whole or in fragment
is a fascination
...
while if you yourself try what Aragon did
it never need end
you never finish describing anything
all details lead to other details
all stories lead to other stories
...
and now?
the sterile organised space of the supermarket?
enthralling
the windblown alleyway?
captivating
the flat emerald plain of paddies stretching off to the south?
beautiful
the large dead cockroach on the stairs?
amazing
the tailor at his sewing machine by the step of his shop?
compelling
his shop?
wowing
...
for almost everything is beautiful
in its own way
of course
and the lesson
of course
is to find that way
...
and there are million ways to be beautiful
a trillion
...
so this is a relativism
a more localised, perhaps, democratic sense of beauty
and requires a multiheaded view of the world
rather than
one-view-fits-all
requires taking everything on its own terms
rather than your own fixed samesame terms
...
so
in this logic
a “liberated” head is one which has freed
is freeing
itself to be able to see things in many different ways
...
while me I walk a lot
ten miles or so a day
and frequently
I just walk
choose a direction and go
...
like I do here
in Sri Lanka
where a purposeless march can be a comedy
for, as I have posted before
here, the great cry of the locals to the foreigner
especially this striding ambler
is
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
which I get all the time
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
it’s the first question which comes into a Sri Lankan head
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
and sometimes it’s even partially aggressive
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
every outside hour of many days
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
I’ve even been asked it while sitting
yes sitting, as in stationary
on a bench by the lake
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
which is a telling question for me because
often
often often
I do not know where I’m going
am very rarely lost, proper lost
but I often do not know where I’m going
am planless more than aimless
striding more than ambling
...
while
the side road, the back alley, the river bank, the bridge
enthralling
captivating
enravishing
the smeared, the distending, the rubble
beautiful
...
with the eternal call
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
...
my friend Kate Noakes
told me about
“situationist walking”
which is to just walk in a straight line
and which term I kinda resented
for it is what I’ve been doing for decades anyway
and I didn’t want an encapsulating term for it
an ism, an ist
for it, the thought, impulse, decision that
yes, I’m gonna go that way
and just keep going no matter
and if I have to detour around
because of a railway line
a builder’s yard
a ...
well, I will
...
and then there’s the idea of a “flaneur”
which is yet more old-school French over-definition
...
“The flâneur may therefore be characterised as a deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savouring the multiple flavours of his city.”
...
Baudelaire and all that
which does seem to be a worthwhile way to enjoy the urban differents
...
and which aesthetic kinda got excellently rebirthed by Iain Sinclair
(Lights Out For The Territory, and all that)
and the psychogeography school of writing from the 1990s on
which definitely have Louis Aragon as a distant antecedent
along with Andre Breton’s excellent book Nadia
...
just a reminder
this was written in Feb 2022
in central Sri Lanka
yet never seen by any but one
...
while yesterday i got kinda
lost
in the corrugated iron lanes of the
crowdedly busy fishing village in South East Jaffna
Tamil and rather Christian
and quite the poorest place I’ve been in a long time
though the locals are quite well dressed
yet the shacks, the numbers of people and the
extreme skankiness of the mangy skeletal dogs
speak volumes
fishing folk tend to be the poorest in many countries
like here
a people who, lest we forget, lost a brutal war
...
yet few seem to apply the logic of the flaneur to
a place like
a Sri Lankan back-road
the last car-repair place heading East out of Carcassonne
the pile of cow heads behind the butcher’s market in Ende on Flores
the back alleys of the Plateau in Montreal
the corridors of the immigration office in Karwar, Karnataka
the sterile aisles of a supermarket in Estrella
or Bracknell, or Vancouver, or Mostar
the seats of the battered bus south from Campeche
...
they are all beautiful
if you try
if you let them
...
the rotting tomato in the hedgerow
the hedgerow
the humus under the hedgerow,
the grille on that abandoned car
designed by someone
made by someone else
and done that exact way for an exact reason
though that reason may well be long lost…
...
while this post was begun in
a place which rhymes with itself as it goes along
Anuradhapura
famed for the Buddhist shrines
I couldn’t be arsed with
...
so I chose instead to enjoy the leafy green lanes
the riverside ambles
the quiet bridges
the levees of the many lakes
the ten mile plus march, stroll, saunter, limp, stagger down and down green green country lanes just to get the bus straight back because, by then, i was way too knackered, and new-shoe foot-very-sore, to climb the actual hill to the giant stupa i had come all this way to go see
...
so i
two eyes
in a head
on shoulders
above two walking legs
am choosing to pace the
back ends of the back alleys, boonies and backroads
on my slow
planless and solo
goalless and just-so
meandering zagzig
across this country still new to me
kinda killing time in the Lankan limbo
after the Indian afterlife paradise
...
because
EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL
and it’s all good
because
it is
...
...
...
...
at some point I will have to try to link these ideas with
the idea from my Camino chum, Marina from Bari
that, on the Camino Di Santiago
…
“you find metaphors on the way, as you go
and in those metaphors you find lessons”
...
and with the idea that
you can understand the whole world from considering a grain of sand
and understand a grain of sand from regarding the world
...
and so I go on
singing
not singing
Ray Stephen’s song
“Everything is beautiful, in it’s own way”
...
its more a liberal Christian song
than a hippy-dippy piece
Everything Is Beautiful
...
...
so all the above was written in Sri Lanka
Jaffna i guess
and for some reason which eludes me
i never posted it anywhere
...
and i’ve come back to it because
i have some big ideas percolating around my head
...
...
firstly
the might-be Brian Eno quote
which i’ve been mulling over for decades
and which is actually
...
“A forest, seen from the air, is complex and interesting.
A single tree is equally complex.
One leaf, even one molecule is endlessly fascinating.”
...
which is a most rewarding way to think
...
...
plus
the idea that everything is fascinating
is coupling with my quote in The Bucket
...
The Human Brain Is Built For Fascination
...
...
plus a piece from The Bucket
which was in last year’s show
...
“Almost everything in this world
Can be seen as beautiful
Yet far less can be seen as ugly.
And so, it simply follows
There is an arc in this world
Which bends towards beauty”
...
...
while The Bucket also has the line
...
This world, i been around,
And again,
And you know the main
Thing i found?
Everywhere is fascinating
Everything is a comedy and
Everyone is ridiculous
...
...
and another line i’m thinking about at great length is
that most of the world is best seen at
walking speed
not all, but most
and almost anything detailed, full of humans
is best experienced at walking pace
...
...
plus there’s Marina’s idea
and there’s the grain of sand
...
...
while after all this
i’m not sure i wholly believe
Everything Is Beautiful
yet i do believe
Everything Is Fascinating
...
...
so at some point soon
on a beach in the Andamans
in a Muslim semi-slum South of central Chennai
or on a Himalayan hillside in Ladakh
i’m going to have to syncretise these notions
...
...
...
...
in other news
got myself in a pickle in a dense jungle
i couldn’t find a way out of
where i had to remind myself
there must be a way out of here
because, obviously, duhhh
i found a way in
…
…
posted from Govind Nagar
Havelock Island
in The Andamans
…
…